Crowd Influence
In lecture, we looked at some network principles behind influence, specifically in how crowds can influence the decisions and actions of individuals. I was interested by this and decided to look into more about the social decisions that take place in influence from others.
This is discussed in the article I have chosen for my post. The article mentions the restaurant example we talked about in lecture, which got me to relate this topic immediately to the course. One thing it mentioned right away was the tendency that we have to base our decisions on decisions by others: “Regardless of ‘the what’ and ‘the where’ there is a universal truth at play. Witnessing others behaving in a particular way will often lead to us “follow the crowd” in a largely automatic and unthinking fashion.” A couple times, the article refers to this following of the crowd as a social proof. Seeing a large number of people acting in one way over another proves the socially acceptable/popular choice.
What I found intriguing is the fact that the majority of the article is dedicated to explaining why people don’t follow crowds, as opposed to why they do. The fact that we subconsciously choose to forgo our thoughts because of what we see around us is somewhat worrisome. The article points out that just as there are times when people purposely follow the crowd, there are also times when people purposely do not. For example, in a situation where the crowd is older or younger than you are, you may not want to follow this crowd. This occurs due to feeling that you do not belong to these groups of people, nor do you want to be influenced by them. Many people assume that the social norm is to follow the crowd, but you have to think more below the surface about this, as the article demonstrates. There are many factors that come into play when making social decisions, like who is in the crowd, what the decision is for, etc. As there are many obvious times when people copy the choices of the majority in social decisions, there are just as many instances in which people will purposely not do this.
The article also describes why people not only diverge from crowds where they do not fit in but also from ones where they do. In an experiment, participants hypothetically chose a new car, given that the majority of people had chosen Car A1 and the minority had chosen Cars A2 and B1. The article brings out the moral dilemma in this situation. If participants went with Car A1, the majority, “they satisfied their need for social identification.” But oftentimes, people want uniqueness over social coherence. Picking the cars in the minority “satisfied their desire for individual uniqueness.”
Relating this back to class, I thought of the bin of balls experiment. Students can choose to guess based on previous guesses, but there is really no way to tell if other students are simply doing the same thing and just following the crowd. They could be telling the truth, or they could be going with the color that seems to be popular. Like the article says, people see a proof in numbers. Seeing a crowd makes us believe something, before we even see what the crowd is waiting on.